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If I were a man…

Sometimes I wish I’d been born a male. Then I wouldn’t have a guilty conscience about leaving the washing up in the sink or neglecting to keep the refrigerator stocked up. The dog would go un-walked and I wouldn’t care; I need to write and all other petty considerations are secondary.

Male writers of my acquaintance don’t seem to be troubled by such trivialities. I don’t mean to be provocative, but they have a much easier time of it – getting up, eating some breakfast and finding their way to the computer seems to be all that is required of them each morning. Their lunch will magically arrive at a pre-arranged time. They are, after all, writers, not housewives.

Oh. But I’m a writer too. I also have a day job, but if I didn’t shop, cook, pay the bills and make sure the washing found its way into the machine every once in a while, we’d have starved to death under a mountain of dirty laundry a long time ago. So it seems I’m also a housewife, though I’ve never entered that particular title on an application form. I’ve got nothing against housewives, you understand, I just wish I had one.

And there’s the rub. Male writers usually have someone in the background, oiling the wheels of their daily existence and attending to the minutiae of their lives, making sure that their minds are free to be creative. Female writers, for the most part, are also that person in the background. OK, we can all manage to ignore a lot of housework; most of it isn’t important anyway and Quentin Crisp was right, dust doesn’t get any deeper after ¼ inch. But we do have to be organised, to have systems in place to manage our lifestyles, in order to create time and space for what we need to do – to write.

9 thoughts on “If I were a man…”

Now there’s an idea for a business. Rent a housewife! You could choose from packages like once a week or twice a month, and a helpful woman would come in and do all the basic chores like cooking and basic cleaning. On those days, you could simply write while everything else was done quietly in the background. Hmm…

I need a wife. I need a me. My husband goes out to work and comes home and does…..well, I think he helps, he washes up sometimes, but mostly I do it. I shop, I cook, I wash, I iron, I clean. And I write. I’m seeing a problem in this equation.

Bless ’em, they really think they’re helping, don’t they? But then, I suppose if the car breaks down and I need rescuing, or I want some shelves putting up…. my knight in shining armour will oblige. Seems he has his uses after all. 🙂

You know what grips me? They shower, shave, get dressed and are ready to go. No doing of hair, putting on make-up, changing outfit twice, transferring purse contents to purse that matches outfit, changing panty hose because we snagged . . . well, you get the idea.

Oh to have someone to help a little around the house… Bliss. My husband does try to help, he will occasionally glance at the hover or pretend to wipe a side in the kitchen. Actually he is not too bad and does quite a bit – 30%. But that’s the rub I guess, I consider 30% quite a lot – is it though? Not really when you consider I am doing 70% and some days he is able to work from home!
However, he does love me and is the best person I know so I guess I’m stuck wiith him. I wonder if he would mind me getting a wife?

I shouldn’t complain either; my mate is a saint compared to some I know. And he’s just redecorated a room for me, and he HATES painting. So I exaggerate a little? So what? I’m a writer – he understands 🙂